


Evergreen

by hlmedinfl



Category: Makai Ouji: Devils and Realist
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-09 11:14:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4346444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hlmedinfl/pseuds/hlmedinfl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The moment after Mycroft's father dies comes like a wave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Evergreen

The shrill peal of female laughter rips Mycroft from his thoughts. A slight rumble follows, a rumble that whispers and murmurs and flows along a tide. From here, the people downstairs sound like a surging sea. Not a single voice rises above the current, lost in white foam.

William Twining is beside him, and Mycroft thinks he should say something, but he knows, if he speaks his voice will creak and groan and something he doesn’t want will come spilling out. He’s sure of it.

His gaze ignores what’s in front of him and peers into the parlor room. From here, William’s friends look as if they are fading into the background. For a moment, Mycroft thinks they are literally fading, their outlines blur and shift. He cannot make out their faces anymore; he squints and wipes the saline from his eyes.

Another rumbling fills the hallway. Someone is playing a piano far away, perhaps Liszt.

He will have to tell them, won’t he? He will have to be the jarring key that breaks the harmony of their sojourn.

Yet, right now, the people downstairs are only echoes. He remembers the ocean. In the summer, his family used to go there. He walked the path of evergreens down to the shore, along the beach, until mother’s parasol became a white dot among the shoals. The sky had risen then, in reds and orange and yellows and blues and purples. A sky so hauntingly beautiful that he’d decided, his heart brimming briefly, that he would have liked to be a painter. Just in that one instant, the world seemed endless and he could have melted where the dark pelt of the ocean cusped against the sky. But he didn’t bother mentioning it to his father. There were no painters in the Swallow family and no room for paints in his incredibly narrow future. His destiny had already been laid out meticulously before him in the hues of crisp, white parchment and brown calf-skin boots and ink as black as gun powder. It was insoluble. And with a sad and wearying heart, he’d tucked the thought of being a painter away and inhaled and smelled the sea.

Something crashes in the hall, a tiny lilt of shattering glass.

“Mycroft, dear?” The red flush in his mother’s cheeks quickly recedes. Only the flowers in her hair retain any hint of living color. Mycroft remembers how she ordered those flowers fresh from some fertile crescent of the world, growing not three days before, perfuming her delicate coif with a quixotic fragrance.

He should get up and go to her. He has so much to do. There is so much time that he cannot waste. He should say something to her, but his mouth is dry, his tongue slapping helplessly against his the roof of his mouth like flotsam. His eyes curiously wander back to William’s two friends. He’s never noticed it before, but when he looks at them, he feels a hand rasping against his heart and sees soulless eyes clinging to an existence without meaning.

_That man was definitely not his father._

He chokes then.

“Sorry, William. This isn’t really…” That’s when the torrent comes, a cacophony of unearthly sobs that rattle something deep within. His hand flies up to restrain himself, subduing the groans into inaudible gasps.

He wonders what he wanted to say to William.

Perhaps  _I knew. I knew that my father was dead; he was too different, he wasn’t the same man._

Then something hits his shoulder, as solid as a plank of wood. “But it _is_ , Mycroft. It’s how you think it is.”

He inhales and smells the sea, the sea that runs down his face and dissolves in the ashes beneath him. It was all he had thought it would be. And just for once, he wishes he would have been wrong about something.


End file.
